Emerging Illness in Workers and Age of Retirement

Definition: Ailments that arise at specific places and moments and are transformed, or threaten to be transformed into new epidemics.  The concept of new ailments include illnesses of new appearance, previously unknown; it do not necessary mean that the ailment did not previously exist, it refers mainly to its recent identification, knowledge, extension or seriousness.  Emerging illness considers ailments related to new factors, as well as ailments with known casual factors that have recently become an epidemic issue, transforming itself into a threat in those regions where this ailment did not previously exist.   In the last three decades a series of illnesses have been identified as “emerging”. They emerge frequently as a consequence of ecological/environmental change given the change in social and demographic factors, as well as technological progress. When certain population faces abrupt changes in the environment or technology, there are consequences.   Emerging illness is influenced by demographic and behavioral changes, new technologies and industrial products, economic development and changes in land use, abrupt migration, microbe adaptation and indiscriminate use of medicines, absence or lack of legislation in public health.  Emerging illnesses have social and economic consequences in health and life quality of populations, as well as in productivity and work.   The presence of new of chemical, physical, biological, ergonomical and psychological risk factors in almost every labor activity are generating a series of emerging illnesses in the working class.  Ailments such as different kind of cancer, psychosocial musculoskeletical alterations such as Burnout and mobbing, cardiovascular and circulatory such as blood pressure caused by stress, biological such as VIH and B and C hepatitis, are emerging illnesses that can come from labor exposure; the old age retired worker who have been exposed to a series of risk factors in the workplace generally present the illness many years after.